British Industrial History

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1964. Large flywheel and belt pulley system operating the rolling mill at Ayrton.

1964. Man catching the sheet and passing it back through the rolling mill.

1964. Dorman Long Map of the Works.

Dorman, Long and Co of Middlesbrough were a major manufacturer and fabricator of steel components and structures.

The firm began as an iron and steel works manufacturing bars and angles for ships. A natural progression from this was to become involved in the construction of bridges, particularly when Dorman Long took over the concerns of Bell Brothers and Bolckow, Vaughan and Co in the late 1920s. [1]

1875 Number of blast furnaces increased to 100, producing two million tpa.

1876 Dorman, a metal broker, launched a partnership with Albert de Lande Long, taking over an existing plant, the West Marsh ironworks, Middlesbrough, initially manufacturing iron bars and angles for shipbuilding.

1880s the firm switched to the new steelmaking technologies, installed open-hearth furnaces and exploited the breakthroughs of Gilchrist and Thomas

1889 The company was registered on 2 November, to take over the business of manufacturers of iron and steel bars of the firm of the same name at Middlesbrough-on-Tees, and other businesses have since been acquired. [5] Operated the Britannia Works and the West Marsh Works[6].

Over-capitalized and burdened with debts, Dorman sought refuge in another merger with an equally ailing neighbour, Bolckow Vaughan.

1929 Acquired Bolckow, Vaughan and Co; the latter controlled Redpath, Brown and Co; the bridge-building and structural engineering parts of Dorman together with the Redpath business would assume a commanding position in structural engineering[20].

1946 Dorman Long and Co purchased 600 acres of land between the Redcar and Cleveland Works to build the Lackenby development.

1947 Civil engineering work had been done at the site at Lackenby but construction of the new plant had not started by the end of the year. It was planned to build 2 new blast furnaces at the Cleveland Works.[24]

1979 The number of blast furnaces drops to one - producing 3.3 million TPA.[35]

1990 they were merged with the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Co and were still involved in the design, manufacture, fabrication and erection of many different types of structures such as bridges, buildings, offshore platforms, airports, etc, with one of the most recent high profile contracts, being the new Wembley Stadium in London, England.

2000 Formed in this year and now called Dorman Long Technology, based in Northants [36]

"Dorman Long, founded in 1876, became a public company in 1889. It grew by a series of amalgamations which absorbed such famous names in the British iron and steel industry as Bell Brothers and Bolckow Vaughan. The first company in Britain to roll steel joists (in 1883), Dorman Long (Steel) Ltd. is the largest producer in the United Kingdom of steel for the structural industry. The company is responsible for approximately 9% of the steel output of the country and has a capacity of 2·6 million ingot tons per annum. Today it operates four steelworks, a wire works, a sheet works and a plastic-coated sheet plant.

Since 1945 Dorman Long have spent virtually £100m. on capital development, the outstanding feature of which has been the installation of a universal beam mill at the Lackenby Works where there is also a continuous billet mill and a rod mill. In December, 1963 a stabbing and blooming mill was brought into operation to serve a new universal plate mill, now under construction at Lackenby together with a new rod mill. The whole of the company's iron making is now concentrated at the Clay Lane blast furnace plant where three furnaces of 1,500 tons per day nominal capacity are in operation.

At the turn of the century a bridge and constructional department was created and the Dorman Long Structural Group today is responsible for approximately 22% of the steel structural engineering industry of Great Britain. It has built many famous bridges in different parts of the world and its other structural activities cover the construction of factories, power stations, multi-storey buildings and similar type of structures.

On the north bank of the Tees, at Port Clarence, Dorman Long (Chemicals) Ltd. operate an important chemical plant where crude tar and benzole from the South Bank Coke Ovens are refined to produce a variety of chemical products.

All the company's works are situated on the banks of the River Tees, affording exceptionally good facilities for the discharge of foreign ore and fuel oil, and the export of finished products. The Dorman Long Group, including its overseas structural-engineering companies, today employs 25,000 people."

↑You mention the number of blast furnaces dropping to one in 1979. This is not strictly true. Although the three biggest Clay Lane furnaces closed and Redcar Blast furnace operated onwards, there were in fact still two smaller blast furnaces in operation through until 1993. These were known as Numbers 3 and 4 and were at the Cleveland Works next to the Clay Lane Furnaces. Sometimes known as the Merchant Iron Plant. They were used to cover for the Redcar blast furnace during its 100 day reline and then went back to producing ferro manganese until they were closed in 1993. One was to produce a manganese product and I forget the other. 2018/10/13 MF. and 2019/01/02 MF